t 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

Chap*-. Copyright No. 

«U 0 ~- ' ^ 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



/ 



"LIFE" SERIES. 



Lowell Times.— The books are very beautiful, and excellently 
adapted for simple gifts. Their value, however, is in their 
contents : self-development, helpfulness, unselfishness, great- 
hearted manliness. 

Baltimore American. — There is a tranquil, strengthening, 
uplifting power in these little books that makes one cherish for 
them, when they have been enjoyed and laid aside, the warm, 
grateful sentiment with which we treasure dear friends. 



"LIFE" SERIES. 

Cloth, beveled, neatly stamped, each 50 cents. 
Special white and gold edition, f ull gilt, each §1.00. 

& 

The House Beautiful, By William C. Gannett. 
As Natural as Life, By Charles G. Ames. 

In Love with Love, Ey James H. West. 

A Child of Nature, By Marion D. Shutter. 
Power and Use, By John W. Chadwick. 



[Others, by different writers, in preparation."] 



* # * For sale by booksellers, or sent, postpaid, on 
receipt of price, by 

JAMES H. WEST, Publisher, 

174 High Street, Boston. 



Power and Use 




JOHN W. CHADWICK 

Author of "The Faith of Reason," "The Man Jesus," 




BOSTON 1 
James H. West, Publisher 
174 High Street 




Copyright, 1896, 
By JAMES H. WEST. 



Laurel-crowns cleave to deserts, 
And power to him who power exerts. 
Hast not thy share ? On winged feet, 
Lo ! it rushes thee to meet; 
And all that Nature made thy own, 
Floating in air or pent in stone, 
Will rive the hills and swim the sea, 
And, like thy shadow, follow thee. 

— Emerson. 

(3) 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Enduring Hardness . . . . , 0 . . . . 9 

Transformation . . 33 

Work and Rest 59 
The Beseeching God . . . . . . . . . . 87 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



Ruby wine is drunk by knaves, 
Sugar spends to fatten slaves, 
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons ; 
Thunder-clouds are Jove's festoons, 
Dropping oft in wreaths of dread 
Lightning-knotted round his head. 
The hero is not fed on sweets: 
Daily, his own heart he eats; 
Chambers of the great are jails, 
And head-winds right for royal sails. 

— Emerson. 

(8) 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



From first to last, I doubt not, there have been 
many sermons written on the text which 
occurs in the second letter to Timothy, "Endure 
hardness as a good soldier." Especially in times 
that tried men's souls, when armies have been 
mustering and meeting in the shock of battle, 
not only the chaplain on the tented field or in 
the populous hospital, but almost equally the 
preacher who has remained behind with the 
men too old for service, the women and the 
children, must have found this venerable injunc- 
tion dilating with a new significance, and fairly 
thrusting itself upon him as the only one entirely 
suitable to the exigencies of the hour. The text 
is one which, for its best interpretation, needs 
the flash of musketry, the blaze of burning 
villages, the light that shines in eyes that seek 



10 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



in vain for faces they will never see again. We 
should expect some soldier or some soldier's wife 
to write the best sermon ever written on this 
text. And, if we could collect and then collate 
all of the sermons ever preached upon it, I 
doubt not that the fact would be precisely what 
we should expect. Certainly, the best sermon I 
have ever seen upon it was written by a soldier's 
wife, — Mrs. Juliana Horatia Ewing. It is called 
" The Story of a Short Life." It isn't nominally 
a sermon, and, come to think of it, the text 
" Endure hardness as a good soldier" is not 
placed at its beginning and is nowhere quoted, 
if I recollect aright. No matter ! The story is 
a sermon, and it is upon this text. This text 
is everywhere in and between the lines, as those 
who know the story and love it as I do will bear 
me witness. 

I am sure that many of my readers, and I trust 
the most of them, have read "The Story of a 
Short Life." Those who have done so will not, 
I trust, be sorry to recall its various charm for a 
few moments, while I indicate its character to 
the end that I may show what a pathetic and 
impressive sermon it is upon its silent text, 
" Endure hardness as a good soldier." 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



11 



The short life was that of a little English boy 
whose stately home was very near the soldiers' 
camp at Aldershot, in which he took so great an 
interest that he was always wanting to go there 
and see what was going on. The barrack-master 
was his uncle ; and this fact, together with his 
father's local dignity, made him a lad of privilege 
with officers and men. He was not by any means 
a faultless child, but self-willed and obstinate ; 
obstreperous, too, when crossed in any inclina- 
tion. So, when there was to be some great parade 
of all the regiments in camp and others from 
elsewhere, he would take his dog with him in 
the carriage, and he would stand up on the seat 
to salute the soldiers, and he would hold the dog 
in his arms ; and the dog didn't like the situa- 
tion, nor did the horses ; and they pranced, and 
Leonard fell, and from that day until his death 
he was a miserable little cripple, seldom with- 
out pain. But he wasn't made a perfect little 
saint at once by his misfortune. He was made 
more irritable than ever, and more impatient 
and exacting. Meantime, his interest in the 
soldiers had not abated in the least. Here was 
the mother's opportunity. She had wanted him 
to be a soldier, and was proud of his insistence 



12 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



that he would be one. Now this could never be ; 
but was she willing that her son should be a 
coward because it was not the trumpet's sound 
that summoned him to fortitude ? If she could 
not gird on his sword, might she not help liim to 
carry his cross with martial courage ? So she 
appealed to him to endure his hardness like a 
good soldier, with heroic patience, without com- 
plaint or murmuring. And the boy responded to 
her call. Henceforth, his aim was to translate 
his life, its pain and weariness and deprivation, 
into the terms of soldier-discipline and the 
vicissitudes of a soldier's life. His days in bed 
should be his days in hospital ; his aching back 
should be a soldier's wound ; when it was worst, 
a soldier's night upon the field of battle, wounded 
and faint, with sleepless eyes impatient for the 
break of day. And, though it didn't seem to him 
that anything that he could ever do or bear would 
merit a Victoria Cross, he did his best to keep 
from anger and complaint, until one day his soul 
went up to heaven from a narrow bed in the real 
barracks, cheered by a soldier's song that he had 
always loved to hear, but which this time he 
heard not to the end. 

And now, perhaps, my readers are saying that 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



13 



the experience of this martial child was so 
peculiar and unique that really it does not afford 
a basis of experience for men and women gen- 
erally, who are called upon to suffer and endure. 
It isn't every suffering child that has an Alder- 
shot at hand to furnish his imagination with 
materials into which he can translate the pains and 
deprivations that are incidental to his marred and 
wasting life. It isn't every suffering child that 
has the stuff in him that vibrates to the music 
of the spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, 
and all the various pride and pomp and circum- 
stance of glorious war. Moreover, there was 
something childish in the boy's translation of his 
experience into the terms of camp and battle, 
wounds and hospital, which would be quite 
impossible for grown men and women, little 
given to sentiment or imagination, but with no 
immunity from the trials, calamities and tragedies 
that enter so considerably into the majority of 
human lives. I have no desire to break, or even 
palliate, the force of these objections. Never- 
theless, "The Story of a Short Life" is one 
which has significance for all men and women 
and for all boys and girls who have been " made 
subject to "weakness," to deprivation, to dull or 



14 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



agonizing pain. Such cannot read it without 
sudden access of encouragement and strength. 
It is a story which all maimed and suffering folk 
might learn by heart with great advantage. It 
is a story which the most robust and fortunate 
of men, if they have any sensibility, cannot read 
without rebuke and inward shaming on account 
of their own fretfulness and impatience, simply 
because they have not everything they want. 

Meantime, the only hardness in this world is 
not that of physical pain and its concomitants 
of weariness and deprivation. It is only here 
and there, at rarest intervals, that we meet a 
man or woman who appears to bear a charmed 
life. And these do not invariably present an 
enviable appearance to those who, measured by 
the usual standards, are miserable in comparison 
with them. There is something tiresome in the 
sleekness of their dull complacency. It is like 
the oily calm which sometimes settles on the 
sea, till we could cry "Blow, winds, and crack 
your cheeks ! " Come anything to break up this 
monotony ! Better the hurricane than this ! 

But there is little danger that the majority 
of men and women will be afflicted by this 
"domestic happiness of the greasy kind," as 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



15 



John Morley aptly phrases it. " Man is born to 
trouble as the sparks fly upward." The ancient 
text is not discredited by the lapsing centuries. 
Even to hide and sneak in cowardly avoidance 
of the burdens and anxieties that are incidental 
to the common life of men is no security against 
them soon or late. But if one chooses from the 
start to be a man among men, to do his part in 
the world's work, to take his place in its wide 
ranks and march with it to victory, then from 
the start he must make up his mind to endure 
hardness like a good soldier, and that there will 
be plenty of it for him to endure. Either to 
imagine that there is very little hardness in the 
world, or that what there is can be avoided by 
judicious management, is a profound mistake 
which the mistaken will discover soon or late. 
The contingencies of business enterprise, of the 
professions and the arts men freely choose for 
livelihood or in some passion for ideal good, of 
political conscience followed in despite of hostile 
taunts and friendliest admonitions, of rational 
conviction openly confessed, let come what will, 
of misunderstanding and misrepresentation on 
the part of those whom we have loved and 
trusted most, of health that may be broken, of 



16 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



labor that may change from a delight to utter 
weariness, either because too long pursued or 
because cisterns that were full now gape at every 
stave, of love that asks too little or too much, of 
death that makes a void where all was pleasant- 
ness, — all these contingencies are natural and 
inevitable to the lives of men who are not only 
in the world, but of the world. 

And they are contingencies that involve hard- 
ness of an amount and bitterness which it is 
scarcely possible to overrate. Hardly a day goes 
by and we do not come upon some fresh example 
of the all-pervading tendency. What ruinous 
business losses and catastrophes overtaking men 
who seemed secure against all ruin or mishap, 
and whose honor was as stainless as the just 
fallen snow ! What tragedies of physical suffer- 
ing develop under the most genial superficial 
areas of apparent health ! What seeds of later 
sorrow in the red rose of present happiness, 
whose breath intoxicates the heart ! What 
cruelty of friendship which from a single act, 
mistaken or misunderstood, deduces an opinion 
counter to all the testimony of " a cloud of wit- 
nesses " ! What bolts that sometimes fall out of 
the clearest sky to blast men's happiness ! What 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



17 



dreadfulness of vacancy and silence where there 
has been dearest presence and voices that were 
sweeter than all music in our ears ! Such are a 
few of the contingencies which life involves. 
Such is a little of the various and immeasurable 
hardness which in the natural course of personal 
and social evolution we are called on to endure. 
To endure it like good soldiers is the mark of 
our high calling. 

And how do good soldiers endure hardness ? 
Much of the hardness that is incidental to a 
soldier's life they bear with genial merriment. 
They make a joke of it. "We'll buy our gloves 
together / " cry the cavalry riders who have lost 
each a hand in battle. Now, the great military 
memoirs of Grant and Sherman, and scores of 
regimental histories and volumes of personal 
reminiscence written by those who knew our 
soldiers well in camp and hospital, are studded 
thick with stories of this sort, — stories whose 
burden is the skill and genius that our soldiers 
had for finding something humorous and laugh- 
able in their discomforts and their deprivations, 
and even in their sufferings and wounds, as where 
the soldier whose cheek had been shot away, 
explaining why he hadn't asked sooner for what 



18 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



he wanted, said lie " hadn't the face to do it." 
Goethe's mother said that, when Wolfgang had a 
trouble, he made a song out of it, and got over it. 
And so the good soldier of a hundred wars and 
histories, when he has had a hardship, has made a 
joke out of it ; and, if he hasn't got over it, has got 
under it in such a way that he can carry it with- 
out being miserably bent or utterly broken. How 
many noxious swamps and barren wildernesses 
have blossomed with this flower of noble gayety ! 
And this soldier quality has often had abundant 
exercise under conditions very different from 
those of the camp, the march, the hospital. 

True, there is hardness where it finds no place. 
But there is much which can be taken far too 
seriously and solemnly; and it often, — yes, it 
generally is. Not only the hardness of life's 
small annoyances, which are not few, but that of 
deprivations and discomforts which are entailed 
by serious reverses of financial fortune, can be 
so met that it will somewhat relax its frown if 
it does not break into a laugh. The theme is 
stale. So many books and chapters have been 
written about the capital good times which people 
have who are in straitened circumstances that one 
is sometimes tempted to believe that straitened 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



19 



circumstances are the only ones to be desired. 
And, doubtless, there is much exaggeration of 
the fact. There are straitened circumstances 
which are no such pretty play as those the nov- 
elists report. The smile that they elicit must 
be very grim indeed. But to extract sunshine 
from cucumbers is by no means an impossible 
feat ; and there are circumstances which are as 
little promising which can be made to yield a 
brightening gleam. The story-tellers have not 
in the least exaggerated (they could hardly do it 
if they tried) the pleasure and the satisfaction 
that can be derived from conquering difficulties, 
from making much out of a little. When things 
were at their worst in the Crimea, a gentleman 
of my acquaintance visited the French and Eng- 
lish camps. They were equally bad off for food 
and comforts of all kinds. But the Frenchmen 
had contrived to find a humorous point of view. 
The menu was elaborate, though every dish was 
fundamentally the same. A similar difference 
is continually reappearing in life's everyday 
affairs. 

" Winds blow and waters roll 
Strength to the brave, and power, and deity ; 
Yet in themselves are nothing." 



20 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



How does a good soldier endure hardness ? 
He endures it patiently and cheerfully. And 
then it often happens that some comrade or some 
fellow-soldier has been hurt more cruelly, or has 
been longer wasting on his narrow cot ; and he 
asks himself, " Shall I not bear my suffering or 
waiting as sturdily, as uncomplainingly, as he 
is bearing his ? 99 And it often happens, in the 
circle of life's various experience, that, however 
sorely wounded we may be, — pierced through the 
heart, perhaps, but somehow living on, — or what- 
ever grievous waiting we must do, we do not have 
to look far off to find some friend or fellow- 
mortal hurt more dreadfully than we, or caught 
in a more dreary calm, who, nevertheless, does 
not curse God, nor even wish to die, but bears 
his burden with a patient voice and heart, and is 
for us a high example and a holy invitation which 
we cannot choose but heed. Who of us has not 
known, at one time or another, some man or 
woman robbed of everything that makes life 
pleasant to one's soul, stripped of all comforts 
and delights, pent up, it may be, in some narrow 
room, year after year, and yet ever keeping up a 
brave and cheerful heart ? Who of us, by such 
soldierly endurance, has not many times been 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



21 



made ashamed of his own fretfulness and mur- 
muring on account of hardness which, in com- 
parison with this patient sufferer's, was not to 
be named or thought of — was an inappreciable 
speck ? 

How does a good soldier endure hardness ? 
He endures it as a necessary and inevitable con- 
comitant of his service as a soldier. It was what 
he expected when he accepted his commission as 
an officer or when he enlisted in the ranks. And 
so the man who in any sphere of life endures 
hardness as a good soldier endures it as a neces- 
sary and inevitable concomitant of his service as 
a man. Hardship is what such service always 
has entailed. By sneaks and cowards it may be 
avoided ; but by a good man, who is a man good 
for something always, as little as by a good soldier 
can it be avoided. This is the very heart of what 
I have to say about this matter : that the first 
prerequisite for enduring hardness as a good 
soldier endures it is to expect hardness as a 
good soldier expects it, and therefore, instead of 
always trying to avoid it, to meet it squarely 
when it comes. This was the gospel preached 
by Eomola to Lillo, as he leaned his chin upon 
her knee, and she pushed his hair back from his 



22 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



forehead : " There are so many things wrong 
and difficult in the world that no man can be 
great — he can hardly keep himself from wicked- 
ness — unless he gives up thinking much about 
pleasures or rewards, and gets strength. to endure 
what is hard and painful." "And remember," 
she went on, " if you were to choose something 
lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek 
your own pleasure and escape from what is dis- 
agreeable, calamity might come just the same, 
and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, 
which is the one form of sorrow which has no 
balm in it, and that may well make a man say, 
'It would have been better for me if I had never 
been born. ? " 

"I will tell you something," she continued. 
She had taken Lillo's cheeks between her hands 
and his young eyes were meeting hers. " There 
was a man to whom I was very near, so that 
I could see a great deal of his life, who made 
almost every one fond of him, for he was young 
and clever and beautiful, and his manners to all 
were gentle and kind. I believe, when I first 
knew him, he never thought of doing anything 
cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away 
from everything that was unpleasant, and cared 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



23 



for nothing so much as his own safety, he came 
at last to commit some of the basest deeds, such 
as make men infamous. He denied his father 
and left him to misery ; he betrayed every trust 
that was reposed in him, that he might keep 
himself safe and get rich and prosperous. Yet 
calamity overtook him." I do not often quote so 
long a passage, but I quote this without apology; 
for in all literature I do not know of any other 
passage that is so full and packed with ethical 
significance as this. Here is the lesson and here 
is the example. It was her own husband, Tito, 
whom Eomola described to Lillo, his own child 
unlawfully. But there are Titos everywhere; 
we meet them every day. We should some of 
us confess, if we were honest, that we are a little 
Tito-ish ourselves, and perhaps not a very little. 
We, too, like to avoid hardness, to slip away from 
that which is disagreeable, and we know that, so 
far as we have been subject to this disposition, 
it has unmanned us ; it has made us capable of 
mean and selfish things; it has prevented us 
from doing things which we have known right 
well ought to have been done ; it has betrayed 
us into doing things that we know equally well 
ought not to have been done, till there is no 



24 



EXDURIXG- HAKDXESS. 



health in us in comparison with what there might 
have been if we had made up our minds at first 
to endure hardness like good soldiers, and had 
made good that high resolve by constant courage 
in the face of various opposition. 

It is to save ourselves from being Titos and 
from Tito's fate — "calamity falling on a base 
mind," I mean, and not his getting strangled on 
the river's bank, which was a matter of com- 
paratively small importance, — it is to save our- 
selves from such intolerable things that we must 
be self-resolved to endure hardness like good 
soldiers, and, to the end that we may so endure 
it, to expect it, and a great deal of it, so that 
when it comes we may not be surprised or found 
unguarded. The disposition to avoid hardness, 
to slip away from everything that is disagreeable 
or unpleasant, is for the majority such an active 
disposition, and its indulgence adds so to its 
strength, that for its conquest and subordination 
it is necessary that there should be the clearest- 
eyed intelligence that hardness is inevitable to 
the doing and the bearing of a man's part in the 
world, and the steadiest resolve to meet it, when 
it comes, fairly and squarely. But for a man to 
do this in the first flush of his maturity, when 
for the first time he recognizes himself as the 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



25 



master of his own actions, responsible for their 
quality of good or ill, — for him to see that 
hardness is inevitable, and resolve to grapple 
with it when it comes, is no such easy matter, 
if it is even possible, unless in childhood and 
in youth there has been some preparation for 
this attitude and spirit, some education of the 
will that shall have braced it for the choice of 
the right things, however hard, let the wrong 
things, however pleasant, plead as sweetly as 
they may. 

But how often is the fostering and training 
of the child — the boy or girl, the youth or 
maid — of such a character in these last days 
that it affords this needful preparation, that it 
insures this education of the will ? Seldom, and 
almost never where there is any choice of means. 
Where strictest personal and domestic economies 
are enforced by straitened circumstances, there, 
given personal honesty, you will have self-denial, 
and you will have children told and taught that 
for them to gratify their every wish is quite 
impossible. And, when children are so told and 
taught, they have a preparation for the necessary 
hardness of their maturer years, they have an 
education of the will that may enable them to 
resist the allurements of things soft and pleasant 



26 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



when things hard and painful are the things they 
manifestly ought to choose. But average the 
fostering and training of the children and the 
youth now growing up to shape the future of 
America, and consider what it has been for a 
quarter of a century, and the wonder is that the 
Titos are not much more numerous than they 
are ; the wonder is how many of the grown men 
next coming to the stage will be or can be any- 
thing but Titos, anything but selfish, pleasure- 
seeking men, slipping away from everything that 
is unpleasant, disagreeable, or hard. The poor 
vie with the rich in their unconscious tendency 
to impress their children with the idea that they 
must have everything they want, do everything 
they wish. The self-indulgence of men and 
women is only the inevitable corollary of the 
insane indulgence of them, when they were 
children, by their parents. Why should they 
not have everything they want, do everything 
they wish, when they always have had all they 
wanted, when they always have done everything 
that they have wished to do ? The complicity 
with our peculators and defaulters does not stop 
short of the indulgence of the nursery and the 
home-life of children generally. The man must 
have all the yachts he wants, all the country- 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



27 



houses, all the fast horses, because as a child he 
had every plaything that he wanted, because as 
a boy his every wish was law. And so the wife 
who drives her husband into reckless speculation 
or dishonest practices, to keep up her splendor 
of attire, might often trace her shame and his 
back to a mother's fond indulgence of her every 
wish. 

Our educational methods often have a similar 
operation. Better the old curriculum forever 
than that the elective system in our colleges 
should mean that our young men should only 
study what they like. It is the studying and the 
mastering of what they do not like that gives 
them manly fibre and strengthens them for the 
resistances and struggles that no man can avoid 
without dishonor. "What above all things we 
need and ought to teach our children is that to 
endure hardness is the inevitable concomitant of 
all decent manhood and all noble womanhood, 
and that, to endure it like good soldiers, they 
must begin betimes to give up many pleasant and 
agreeable things and to do many that are hard 
and painful. Moreover, let us teach them that it 
is not by any soft avoidance of the disagreeable 
and painful that they can attain to power and 
use or to the purest joy. Danger and difficulty 



28 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



have always been the nurses of men's higher 
faculties. The biographies worth reading are 
seldom those of pampered darlings, but they are 
those of bantlings who have been cast upon the 
rocks. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever/' and 
how many things of beauty the architectural 
genius of Henry Hobson Richardson has left 
behind him in America, which are as certain as 
anything can be to inspire a multitude of others 
from the hands of men touched by his spirit ! 
And the chances are that, but for the ruin of his 
paternal fortune, he would never have attained 
to self-possession, and we should never have had 
the joy in him which has delighted us. But his 
experience is only one of thousands where hard- 
ness that seemed absolutely ruinous has been 
as a celestial spear to force men back on their 
reserves of intellectual and moral power. 

To avoid hardness without meanness, without 
pusillanimity and shame, — this, as the world 
goes, is hardly possible for any man or woman. 
The chances are that even those who cultivate a 
courageous expectation of things hard and pain- 
ful will, as they go on, find their imagination far 
exceeded by the facts they will encounter in the 
way ; for the hardness of physical pain may add 
to itself the hardness of broken fortunes, and 



ENDURING HARDNESS. 



29 



these together may add to themselves the hard- 
ness of death, making invisible for us our best 
beloved; and then the loss of love where life 
remains may add a bitterer pang, and then, — 
God help us ! but our plainest duty may be that 
which, if we do it, friends will hate us, or hence- 
forth deny to us the fulness of their love. Let 
us expect these things, for they have come to 
many. And, if they come, let us endure them 
like good soldiers, as patiently and quietly, as 
cheerfully and sweetly as may be ; for it is by such 
courageous expectation and such brave endur- 
ance, and not by always being softly pleased, 
that we rise into the fulness of the spiritual 
stature and attain unto the regal carriage of the 
men and women who make it good for us to be 
alive, if haply " suffering with them we may be 
also glorified together." 

" Ruby wine is drunk by knaves, 
Sugar spends to fatten slaves, 
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons; 
Thunder-clouds are Jove's festoons, 
Dropping oft in wreaths of dread 
Lightning-knotted round his head. 
The hero is not fed on sweets : 
Daily, his own heart he eats ; 
Chambers of the great are jails, 
And head-winds right for royal sails. " 



I 



I 



I 



TRANSFORMATION. 



As the insect from the rock 

Takes the color of its wing; 
As the boulder from the shock 

Of the ocean's rhythmic swing 
Makes itself a perfect form, 

Learns a calmer front to raise ; 
As the shell, enamelled warm 

With the prism's mystic rays, 
Praises wind and wave that make 

All its chambers fair and strong; 
As the mighty poets take 

Grief and pain to build their song: 
Even so for every soul, 

Whatsoe'er its lot may be, — 
Building, as the heavens roll, 

Something large and strong and free, — 
Things that hurt and things that mar 

Shape the man for perfect praise; 
Shock and strain and ruin are 

Friendlier than the smiling days. 

— John W. Chadwick. 

(32) 



TRANSFORMATION. 



The word which sums up the scientific achieve- 
ment of the nineteenth century to an unpar- 
alleled degree is this word " Transf ormation." 
The achievement corresponding to this word has 
been in two related orders of phenomena, the 
chemical and physical; and in one apart from 
these, the biological. In the former case it is 
the transformation of energy that has been dis- 
covered; in the latter, the transformation of 
species. The two discoveries, taken separately, 
are of great scientific interest and value. Taken 
together, their philosophical and religious value is 
immense and the books elucidating them are the 
most significant that have been written during 
the last half century. They teach impressively 
the unity of that Force which manifests itself 
in the material world and in the human soul. 
"The Lord our God is one Lord": the con- 



34 



TRANSFORMATION 



substantial earth and stars, the sunshine and the 
coal, the rnoneron and the man, all chant in 
unison this sublime confession of the Hebrew 
seer, but with a depth of meaning to which he 
could not attain. 

It is of the transformation or conversion of 
energy that I propose to write, yet not of any of 
those brilliant illustrations of the law of con- 
servation which have been developed by Grove 
and Mayer and Faraday and Tyndall and Thomp- 
son and Joule and others, — illustrations by which 
it is shown that, though the total energy of any 
body or system of bodies cannot be increased 
or diminished by any mutual action, it can be 
transformed into any one of the forms of which 
energy is susceptible, — heat into motion, motion 
into heat, and heat or motion into electricity 
or light or magnetism or chemical affinity or 
mechanical force, and each of these in turn into 
any one of the others, or into all of them in 
various proportions. The conversion of energy 
which I have in mind has little of scientific, 
much of moral interest. Whether or not we 
have here a case of natural law in the spiritual 
world I shall not attempt to prove. But, if we 
have not an extended law, we have a striking 



TRANSFORMATION. 



35 



correspondence. Here, as elsewhere, the nat- 
ural world abounds in wonderful analogies of 
spiritual things, which many, like Professor 
Drummond, in his "Natural Law in the Spiritual 
World," have been inclined to overwork. 

Some of my readers, I am sure, have read the 
Life of Elizabeth Gilbert. The briefest sum- 
mary of what she was and did will afford a very 
striking illustration of one form of moral con- 
servation,— the development of faculty through 
limitation and defect. She was a bishop's little 
daughter, whose sight was destroyed in her 
third year by an attack of scarlet fever, which 
bequeathed to her a general inheritance of ruined 
health. Throughout her childhood and her youth 
she was not unhappy, her misfortune attracting 
to her a great deal of sympathy and attention. 
It was when she came to the threshold of woman- 
hood that the difference between her life and 
that of her several sisters came home to her with 
agonizing force. Then in a happy hour, after 
a period of intense depression, threatening to 
shake her reason from its seat, she met a noble 
woman who cherished the conviction that, even 
for women cut off from love and marriage by 
some superiority or defect, a useful, happy life 



36 



TRANSFORMATION. 



was possible, that the energy of their thwarted 
instincts might be converted into an energy of 
social good. The mind of the poor sightless girl, 
impregnated by the stronger mind of her com- 
panion, conceived a hope that she might accom- 
plish something, notwithstanding her pathetic 
limitation. The energy of her sorrow and de- 
spair was gradually transmuted into an energy 
of sympathy and helpfulness. Advantages are 
obligations. She was blind, but she had every 
alleviation of her calamity that wealth could buy 
or love could give. There were many blind who 
had none of her alleviations. "What could she 
do for these ? In a London cellar she set up a 
shop for the sale of baskets manufactured by the 
blind. This was soon outgrown ; and shortly 
an association was organized for carrying on 
the work, which in a few years could show a 
balance-sheet of £7,000. a Don't work yourself 
to death," a friend said to her one day. u I'm 
working myself to life," she answered, with a 
laugh. Working herself to life ! What pregnant 
words ! How many who now waste themselves to 
death might work themselves to life if they could 
but convert the energy of their frivolity or their 
despair into the energy of some beneficent activ- 



TRANSFORMATION. 



37 



ity! Before Elizabeth. Gilbert's death, thanks 
to her loving zeal, there were large and well- 
appointed workshops in almost every city of 
England where blind men and women were 
employed, where tools had been invented or 
modified for them, and where agencies had been 
established for the sale of their work. But no 
one who understood the course of her experience 
could truly say of her, " She saves others ; herself 
she cannot save." She did save herself ; not from 
all pain and deprivation, but from all bitterness 
of spirit, from all blackness of despair. 

And it is not as if her case were solitary. It 
was very far from being so. The name is legion 
of those maimed and suffering people who, " like 
the wounded oyster, mend their shell with pearl." 
It often seems as if the energy needful for the 
supply of any functional part of a man's nature 
were dammed up in him by the ruin of that part, 
so that, unless it can be diverted into some other 
channel, where it will strike some other wheel 
and set other machinery in motion, it must spread 
itself abroad with ruinous desolation, either con- 
verting into vast malarial pools wide reaches of 
the mind and heart or hopelessly denuding them 
of all fair and fruitful earth. But the energy 



38 



TRANSFORMATION. 



that is thwarted can be diverted and economized 
for noble ends. The thwarted energy of sight 
can be transmuted into quicker hearing and into 
nicer touch. And the principle holds good with 
every part. There are men who never know the 
strength of their reserves of aptitude and skill, 
of manual or intellectual ability, till they are 
pressed back upon them by the bayonet points 
of some calamity that seems about to over- 
whelm them, but, on the contrary, is the sign 
by which they conquer gloriously. A lingering 
convalescence sets a man to reading books that 
turn his thoughts to natural history, and he 
becomes one of the first naturalists of Europe. 
Within ten minutes after his eyes had been put 
out, by the discharge close to them of his father's 
gun, Henry Fawcett had determined that the 
political career on which he had resolved should 
not be forfeited by the untoward circumstance ; 
and his resolve was kept. And it is difficult to 
imagine how, with every sense complete, his 
political career could have been more successful 
than it actually was ; while, in political economy, 
without eyesight, he perceived great laws and 
principles which many now, as then, cannot or 
will not see. Who does not know that it was 



TRANSFORMATION". 



39 



Francis Huber's ruined sight that determined 
the bee-line of his lifelong study and investiga- 
tion into the nature and the habits of the little 
creatures that he could no longer see ? Forced 
into a narrower channel, the struggling river 
gets more deep and clear. With a man's life it 
is not otherwise than so. I doubt not that a 
thousand instances could be discovered, which 
would be representative of ten thousand more, of 
lives shaped by the blows of adverse circum- 
stance into instruments of higher good than 
they would otherwise have accomplished. Where 
would be Milton's "song to generations/' if his 
political ambition had been realized? Where 
Dante's glorious trilogy, if Florence had not 
thrust him out ? Did not the music of a deaf 
Beethoven have to be of a more penetrating 
sweetness, that his soul might hear it ? Jesus, 
when asked, "Who sinned, this man or his 
parents, that he was born blind?" answered, 
" Neither this man nor his parents, but that the 
glory of God might be revealed in him." Now, 
we know well enough that the physical defect 
of children is oftentimes the product of parental 
sin. But we also know that, be that as it may, 
the glory of God is frequently revealed by 



40 



TRANSFORMATION. 



such, defect, and no less the glory of man, in 
that such defect summons the unfortunate to 
completer self-control, self-possession, and self- 
consecration. It were foolish to pretend to any 
preference for a maimed and thwarted to a com- 
plete and sovereign life. But we can be sincerely 
glad that it is possible for men to convert the 
energy of their maimed and thwarted powers 
into the energy of others that are entirely sound ; 
or, if this form of statement is objectionable, 
the energy of their disappointment and despair 
into an energy of resolve and patience and per- 
sistency that shall accomplish more with the 
five talents left to them than they might have 
accomplished with the ten of which at first they 
seemed to be secure. 

But maimed and thwarted powers are not the 
only circumstances in man's average lot that 
produce an energy of conscious misery and loss 
which, is capable of transformation into an en- 
ergy of self -development and social use. Ever 
beautiful to me is the story of Richard Cobden's 
visit to John Bright, when the latter's wife was 
lying dead and the heart of the great commoner 
was shattered by the dreadful blow. u There are 
thousands of homes in England/' Cobden said, 



TRANSFORMATION. 



41 



"that are full of sorrow, if different from yours, 
still very hard to bear, because of unjust laws 
which protect a few while they impoverish 
many. When the first bitterness of your grief 
is past, you will come to me, and we will give our- 
selves no rest until these unjust laws have been 
repealed." And Bright responded to these words 
of generous invitation, and the thing was done. 
The wicked Corn Laws were repealed ; and the 
industrialism of England immediately rallied 
from the depression which the disease of govern- 
mental interference, raging for centuries, had 
produced. It is not as if for every suffering 
heart, made sorrowful by the loss of some dear 
relative or friend, there were always some great 
cause at hand, like that to which Cobden and 
Bright consecrated their lives, their fortunes, 
and their sacred honor. But for every suffering 
heart there is at hand, or can be found, some 
noble task into the energy necessary for the 
doing of which it can transmute the energy of 
its grief and pain. For one it shall be the daily 
honorable strife for maintenance or competence ; 
for another it shall be the steady household care 
or the endeavor to make good to those remaining 
at least a part of the fidelity and wisdom that 



42 



TRANSFORMATION. 



have been withdrawn; or some high work of 
literature or art; or some enterprise of social 
good; or some enthusiasm of political reform. 
And let no one imagine that by such conversion 
of the energy of grief into the energy of labor 
and beneficence we wrong our dead, we make 
more sure that swift f orgetf ulness of *the departed 
which is more tragical than death itself. The 
sorrow that can be cured so easily must be a 
very superficial wound. To consecrate a sorrow 
is not to forget it, is not to lose its sacred presence 
with us, its sublime companionship, the solemn 
radiance of its majestic face. When Mohammed 
was questioned by a follower what monument 
he should devise for his departed mother, the 
prophet answered, "Dig her a well in the desert." 
If the advice was taken, the mother was not on 
this account forgotten sooner than she might 
otherwise have been. There is never any lack 
of deserts in the wide stretch of human life 
between the mountainous boundaries of birth 
and death, wherein, if he will, a man of sorrows 
may dig a well, so husbanding the energy of his 
sorrow, to the end that weary, faint, and thirsty 
travellers may find a moment of refreshment 
there, a thought of human providential care. 



TRANSFORMATION. 



43 



" What shall I do with all the days and hours 
That must be counted ere I see thy face ? 
How shall I charm the interval that lowers 
Between this time and that sweet time of grace ? 

" I'll tell thee : for thy sake I will lay hold 
Of all good aims, and consecrate to thee, 
In worthy deeds, each moment that is told 
Whilst thou, beloved one, art far from me. 

4 'So may this darksome time build up in me 
A thousand graces which shall thus be thine, 
So shall my love and longing hallowed be, 
And thoughts of thee an influence divine." 

This is the true economy of grief. There is 
none other that is so high and good. And, 
whatever be the occasion of our sorrow, there is 
always ready for our refuge and defence this law 
of transmutation, this possibility of converting 
the energy of our sorrow into an energy of use 
and good. There is one book in my library which 
I have occasion frequently to take in hand. No 
duller book was ever made, and yet I always find 
a poem in it as I turn the arid leaves. It is 
Cruden's Biblical Concordance, the result of task- 
work which the man imposed upon himself when 
tortured by "the pangs of despised love/' and 
threatened with the loss of reason by the violence 



44 



TRANSFORMATION. 



of his grief. A very modest instance, but it is 
an illustration of the law. Savonarola furnishes 
another. The energy of hopeless passion has 
been a thousand and ten thousand times con- 
verted into the energy of public spirit, of political 
sagacity, of triumphant music, poetry, and art. 
Men learn in suffering what they teach in song. 
The torrents, which, if not diverted, would have 
scoured men's lives bare of all pleasant verdure 
and all fruitful soil, have been so economized 
that barren places — thanks to their fertilizing 
streams — have laughed for joyousness of flower 
and fruit. 

As with the energy of passionate sorrow and 
of hopeless love, so with the energy of disap- 
pointment and despair, when darling schemes 
have come to nought, when through the stupidity 
or dishonesty of others, or some lack of fore- 
sight or persistence in ourselves, the plans which 
seemed to promise great success and happiness 
fall flatter than a house of cards. 

"The mill-wheel of the human heart 
Is ever going round : 
If it has nothing else to grind, 
It must itself be ground." 



TRANSFORMATION. 



And how often does it grind itself away in useless 
dust, or till it is shattered by its own monotony 
of senseless motion generating fervent heat, when 
it might be making bread of life for hungry 
souls ! There are men and women who, when 
their cherished plans have failed, permit the 
energy of their disappointment and foreboding 
to wreak itself upon themselves in silence and 
apart, and the enormous strength and vitality of 
the human intellect are in no way more pathet- 
ically attested than by its ability to keep itself 
alive and regnant in the midst of such stupendous 
raids upon its life. But there are others who are 
like Antaeus in the old mythology, of whom it is 
related that from every fall to earth he gathered 
strength for the encounter. Not until the battle 
seems to go against them do they " put on terror 
and victory like a robe," converting the energy 
of their disappointment and humiliation into an 
energy of patience and resource that makes the 
miserable defeat a prelude to success more fair 
and glorious than was at first within the scope of 
their desire. "Honor to those who have failed !" 
our burly Whitman cries. Yes, if for no other 
reason than because those who have failed, but 
have refused to stay failed, are those who have 




46 



TRANSFORMATION. 



succeeded best of all. Only the brave deserve 
the fair. Success, the glorious maid, cannot be 
wooed and won in any temper less resolved than 
that of Browning's lover when he sings : — 

"Escape me, never, beloved ! 
So long as the world contains us both, 

While I am I, and you are you, 
I the loving and you the loth, 

While the one eludes must the other pursue. 



"It is but to keep the nerves at strain, 
To dry one' s eyes and laugh at a fall, 
And baffled get up to begin again. 

So the chase takes up one's life, that's all; 
While, look but once from your furthest bound 

At me so deep in the dust and dark, 
No sooner the old hope drops to the ground 
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark, 
I shape me — ever removed." 

This lover's temper does not always bring 
about success in love, as this world reckons. As 
little does it always bring about success when it 
is shown upon the field of practical affairs. But 
this at least is sure in either case, the man is 
a success. He may not win the special object 
of his heart's desire. He does a better thing 
than that. He wins the grace of character, the 



TRANSFORMATION. 



47 



amplitude of life, which, makes of him a man 
indeed. The strength of obstacles which he has 
not overcome, but which he has resisted man- 
fully, has passed into his heart. The man is a 
success. And better this result, a hundred times 
over, than that, while winning every outward 
victory, the man should be a failure in himself, — 
a conjunction which is not infrequent in the 
annals of the past, nor in the experience of the 
latest time. 

There is another aspect of this matter, another 
illustration of this law of transformation, the 
most serious of all, the most important : the 
energy of evil-doing can be converted into the 
energy of righteousness. That was not such 
an absurdity as it was perhaps considered at 
the time, — the remark, "If our friend [a man 
remarkable for moral excellence] were not such 
a good man, what a bad man he would be ! " 
Conversely, it might almost be said of many 
who are not remarkable for moral excellence, " If 
they were not such bad men, what good men 
they would be ! " Might if not " would." They 
cannot do anything by halves. There is in them 
a fund of energy which must express itself, — if 
not in bad actions, then in good. To desist 



i 



48 



TRANSFORMATION. 



from evil-doing and so reach the zero-point of 
virtue is not sufficient for these spirits who 
are so strong and masterful. They are so con- 
stituted that they would rather "sin, and sin 
valiantly," as Luther said, than be like those 
whom Dante saw, whirling about the outer rim 
of hell, " neither for God nor for his enemies." 
Positive evil cannot be expelled from human 
natures by anything less forcible than positive 
good. When Buddha said, u Hatred ceases not 
by hatred at any time, hatred ceases by love," 
doubtless he had in mind men's mutual relations ; 
but it is just as true of the relations of the inner 
life. Xot by hating less and less down to the 
zero-point does hatred cease in human hearts, but 
through some counter-passion of exalted love. 
The vices of the centuries, for the most part, are 
a testimony to the feebleness of "those lesser 
crimes, half converts to the right," — the virtues 
of conventional religion. If those hardy sinners 
could have had presented to them the ideal 
of something better than a cloistered virtue, — 
"immortal garlands not to be run for without 
dust and heat," — they might have been as 
distinguished for their good as for their evil 
deeds. The proverbial expression, " The worse 



TRANSFORMATION. 



49 



the sinner, the better the saint," has more 
of truth in it than it intends. For it intends 
only that the greater the sin repented of, the 
more abject will be the humiliation; and abject 
humiliation was for many centuries the essential 
quality of saintliness, and is so regarded still by 
many. The truth in it is that a negative and 
self-satisfied morality is something from which 
the individual and the community have more to 
fear than from certain outbursts of impassioned 
wickedness. This was the thought of Jesus when 
he told the Pharisees, the models of negative 
virtue in his time, " The publicans and harlots 
shall go into the kingdom of heaven before 
you "; and when he conceived the parable of the 
Prodigal Son, as if the energy of the prodigal's 
reaction from his evil ways was a diviner possi- 
bility than the dead-level moralism of his elder 
brother. Elsewhere in the Bible we read a differ- 
ent lesson : " He that has offended in the least 
has offended in all." But this is the miserable 
legality against which Jesus threw himself with 
all the energy of his sublime contempt. The 
fault of the adulterous woman was less heinous 
in his eyes than her accusers' zeal of accusation, 
or than the bloodless virtues of which they were 



50 



TRANSFORMATION. 



so proud. For the good that was in her evil 
he forgave her, saying, " Go, and sin no more ! " 
But the principle, " He that has offended in the 
least has offended in all," is the principle which, 
embodied in society, has said to almost every 
sinful woman since the time of J esus, " Go and 
sin still more: go and sin hell-deep." It is a 
principle which has been rebuked and shamed a 
million times unconsciously by men and women, 
the aggregate of whose virtue — spite of some 
great offence, it may be more than one — is 
infinitely greater than that of others who have 
never done anything wrong ; but never anything 
generously and beautifully right, — anything not 
merely negative. 

The energy of evil-doing can be converted 
into the energy of righteousness. Yes, but not 
without the intervention of a middle term, — 
not self-contempt, which poisons good desire, 
but noble shame, which makes it pure and 
strong. We may not continue in sin, that grace 
of character may abound. 

" Saint Augustine, well hast thou said 
That of our vices we can frame 
A ladder, if we will but tread 
Beneath our feet each deed of shame.' ' 



TRANSFORMATION. 



51 



There are those who have endeavored to keep up 
the show of hell by the suggestion that human 
nature is " wax to receive and marble to retain " 
the impression of its own evil deeds. And, where 
there is the consciousness of this impression, we 
are told, there must be spiritual torment. There 
are also those who have opposed to the idea of 
divine forgiveness the idea of cause and effect : 
Because every effect must have its cause, every 
fault must have its retribution; "What's writ 
is writ, would it were worthier " ; but there it is 
forever. Something of truth there is, no doubt, 
in these expressions. But there is other truth 
which is every whit as true, and is, moreover, 
full of encouragement and inspiration. What's 
writ is writ ; but something further can be writ- 
ten, — yes, and it can be written over that which 
is the record of our fault, — as in the palimpsests 
of former times men wrote one thing above 
another, — the page first cleansed with purifying 
tears. Men who have erred can so convert the 
energy of their consciousness of error and their 
noble shame into the energy of use and good 
that none whose good opinion is worth having 
will think of them less kindly or with less of 
admiration for the wrong that they have put 



52 



TRANSFORMATION. 



away ; and, better still, they shall be able to for- 
give themselves as freely as they would another 
for faults repented of and cancelled by enduring 
righteousness. 



"Oh, not the nectarous poppy lovers use, 
Nor daily labor's dull Lethean spring, 
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse 
To the soiled glory and the trailing wing." 



Even so the poet comes to the assistance of 
the dogmatist in his endeavor to make out that 
every fault in us is forever a deduction from the 
sum of character and the sum of happiness with- 
in our reach. If man were a dead mechanism, 
it might be so ; but he is a living organism, and 
it is not so. Thank heaven, there are poets who 
have sung a more inspiriting and gladdening 
song ! " They say best men are moulded out of 
faults," is Shakspere's golden phrase. And it is 
certain not only that there are and have been 
better men with faults repented of, and unre- 
joented of, than others of mere negative virtue 
without fleck, but also that there are and have 
been men with some very serious faults, which 
they must painfully remember, who are much 



TRANSFORMATION. 



53 



better than they would or could have been with- 
out such faults. For these have broken up the 
dull stagnation of their lives. They have wrought 
in them a noble shame whose energy they have 
converted into an energy of high behavior and 
beneficent activity. 

" No good is ever lost we once have seen: 
We always may be what we might have been." 

No, not exactly that, but something just as good, 
though different; and something better often- 
times than if we had not gone astray; and, 
if something better, then generally something 
happier. 

But must not the evil deed be always an 
accusing memory? Yes, but I can conceive 
that men should sometimes bless the fault by 
whose reactionary force they have been driven 
in upon their citadel of high resolve. So fight 
I not as one that beateth the air. If there is 
nothing in the range of your experience that 
responds to what I have affirmed, if you have 
always been so just and pure and kind that you 
have no regret or shame whose energy you 
can transmute into heroic purpose, into stern 



54 



TRANSFORMATION. 



resolve, into a high devotion and a holy will, it 
is still possible that you may bring to those less 
fortunate, if they are so, a generous expectation 
that shall co-operate with what is best in them 
in saving them from what is worst, 

Said I not truly, then, that whether or not we 
have in these relations of the moral life a natural 
law extended into spiritual things, we have at 
least a wonderful analogy, and one that is of 
various suggestion all compact ? Wide is the 
range of illustration. The energy of disappoint- 
ment and despair produced by limitation and 
defect, the energy of sorrow for our dead, of 
hopeless passion and of ruinous loss, the energy 
of noble shame for good things left undone and 
ill things done, — all this can be transmuted into 
energy of use and good and helpful holiness, as 
certainly as light and heat and electricity and 
magnetism and chemical affinity and mechanical 
force can be transmuted into each other. It is 
a gospel of deliverance, of hope and cheer. It 
cannot be but that it has for some of us, has 
or will have some day, a meaning answering 
to our need. Let this great law which has so 
many illustrations have unimpeded scope in 
the economy of our joy and sorrow, peace and 



TRANSFORMATION. 



55 



pain. So good shall come, if not straightway, 
or evidently to us at any time, yet soon or late 
to some one in God's world. 

" Not out of any cloud or sky 
Will thy good come to prayer or cry. 
Let the great forces, wise of old, 
Have their whole way with thee, 
Crumble thy heart from its hold, 
Drown thy life in the sea. 

"And ages hence, some day, 
The love thou gavest a child, 
The dream in a midnight wild, 
The word thou would' st not say,— 
Or in a whisper no one dared to hear,— 
Shall gladden earth and bring the golden year." 



WORK AND REST. 



Rest is not quitting 

The busy career; 
Rest is the fitting 

Of self to one's sphere. 

'Tis the brook's motion, 

Clear without strife, 
Fleeing to ocean 

After its life. 

'Tis loving and serving 

The highest and best; 
'Tis onwards ! unswerving — 

And that is true rest. 

—John S. Dwight. 

(58) 



WORK AND REST. 



oistging for rest has created a literature of 



its own in the course of human history. It 
is the burden of innumerable hymns and songs. 
Christian hymnology is full of it. The idea of 
rest is the most central and conspicuous idea of 
the Christian's heaven. " There remaineth a rest 
for the people of God." There is no promise of 
the scriptures that has been dearer to the hearts 
of men than this, and it has been even dearer to 
the hearts of women than to the hearts of men. 
The doctrine of Nirvana is the central doctrine 
of the Buddhist faith. In their interpretation 
of Nirvana the critics are not well agreed. But 
that the heart of the idea is rest — rest from the 
round of change, rest from the fever of desire — 
of this there is no doubt. " It is better to walk 
than to run ; it is better to lie down than to walk ; 




60 



WORK AND REST. 



it is better to sleep than to lie down ; it is better 
to die than to sleep" — this is the Buddhist feel- 
ing, whether to die imports complete annihila- 
tion or only the annihilation of all passion and 
unrest. 

It does not speak well for humanity, this wide- 
spread yearning for inaction, this lotus-eater's 
disposition 

" to live and lie reclined 
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind ! " 

Not rest but action is the noblest capability of 
man. Not longing for rest but longing for action 
is man's noblest longing. But what are we to 
infer from the Buddhist longing for Nirvana, 
from the perpetual cry for rest which goes up 
out of the hymns and homilies of the Christian 
world ? That man is naturally inactive, naturally 
indolent ? No : rather that he has been sadly 
overworked. The Buddhist longing for Nirvana 
was the spawn of an existence made intolerable 
by burdensome and crushing toil. I go into the 
village church hard by my country home, invited 
by the pleasant clangor of the bell, 

Which, ringing, tells the resting village o'er 
How still it was before, 



WORK AND REST. 



61 



and as I look about me on the men and women 
there, so bent and warped with drudgery, so 
battered with their life's incessant toil, I do not 
wonder that they have their dream of dolce far 
niente — sweet doing nothing ; I do not wonder 
that the Bible promise, "There remaineth a rest 
for the people of God," falls soothingly upon 
their ears, and that they can sing with heart as 
well as voice, 

4 'Lord, I believe a rest remains 
To all thy people known, 
A rest where pure enjoyment reigns, 
And thou art loved alone." 

A heaven whose most precious boon is everlast- 
ing idleness may be forgiven as the dream of men 
whose joints are stiff with unremitting toil, of 
women whose life-crushing burdens no ten-hour 
law lightens one minute's length. But it cannot 
be forgiven to men and women for whom work 
and rest have their proportionate and delightful 
alternation. A life of action there as here must 
be the vision that allures. Hark to the words 
in which this vision shaped itself to one* who 
has found out ere this whether his dream could 

* John Weiss, " The Immortal Life," p. 152. 



62 



WORK AND REST. 



shame the fact which waits for us beyond our 
mortal ken : "What star-showers of souls racing 
across the firmament in the brilliant exercises of 
intelligence and passion, of wars for the sake of 
new diplomacies of truth, of struggles to disarm 
the allies of spiritual mischief, to subdue strange 
races of an older world and bring them into the 
service of ideas, to modernize the aborigines of 
this and other planets ; to be modernized in 
turn by the spiritual superiorities whose exist- 
ence we do not suspect ; to clash, resist, combine, 
fraternize ; to wrestle for the highest prizes ; to 
encounter or embrace in the noblest pursuits. . . . 
No baby cherub is the immortal soul, clean bereft 
of tragedy and comedy, exchanging fatuous smiles 
with a crowd of immortal imbeciles, detecting no 
differences, rallying no conceits, contemplating 
no royal reverses, inspired by no more grandeurs 
of the human will. What a heaven it would be 
if man had forgotten to carry with him his 
sublimest emotions, or if Deity had neglected to 
provide the circumstances which force them from 
us at the point of a celestial sword. A heaven not 
worth dying for, and only not a place of torture 
because the nerves which can be wrung and the 
sinews that can be stretched have been drawn out 



WORK AND REST. 



63 



of the frame of the soul. Let us hail a better, a 
more heavenly hope — that the elements will con- 
tinue to challenge our maturest powers, preserve 
them in the pains and exercises of a lusty man- 
hood, furnish imposing situations, tragic moments 
of collision, romances of love— thus triumphing 
forever over death and the grave." 

I can easily imagine that such a vision of the 
future life as this would make more tired than 
ever, if they were not too tired to mentally 
appropriate its intellectual splendor, the men and 
women whose only longing is for everlasting rest, 
so bruised and stiffened have they been in their 
endeavor to keep the wolf of hunger from the 
door and provide for the most homely needs of 
physical life. But it is a vision which, for men 
and women who have had a fair chance and favor- 
able conditions for the development of their 
integral capacity, can alone make the hope of 
immortality worth cherishing ; and for these it 
is so inspiring that it seems to bring with it the 
proof of its sublime fruition. Heretofore the 
trouble with man's dream of immortality has 
been that it has been so cheap and paltry as to be 
out of keeping with the average make of things. 
But here is a dream of immortality which seems 



64 



WORK AND REST. 



grand enough to be possible, good enough to be 
true. 

Thomas Carlyle has sung in lyric prose the 
praise of work as has no other poet, and he has 
not sung one note too sweet or strong. I would 
that every young man and every young woman 
might know by heart those ringing words of his 
in ,/; Past and Present w : " Unstained by wasteful 
deformities, by wasted tears or heart's blood of 
men, or any defacement of the Pit, noble, fruitful 
Labor, growing ever nobler, will come forth — 
the grand sole miracle of Man; whereby man 
has risen from the low places of the earth very 
literally into divine Heavens. Ploughers, Spin- 
ners, Builders, Prophets, Poets, Kings, Brindleys 
and Goethes, Odins and Arkwrights ; all martyrs 
and noble men and gods are of one grand host; 
immeasurable ; marching ever forward since the 
beginning of the world. The enormous, all- 
conquering, flame -crowned host, noble every 
soldier in it ; sacred and alone noble. Let him 
who is not of it hide himself. Let him tremble 
for himself.-' . . . '-'Oh, it is great and there is no 
other greatness. To make some nook of God's 
creation a little fruit-fuller, better: to make some 
human hearts a little wiser, manfuller, happier, 



WORK AND REST. 



65 



more blessed ; less accursed ! It is work for a 
God." It is true every word of it, grandly, 
gloriously true. The most unremitting, the most 
grinding toil is not life's saddest tragedy. A 
life of aimless idleness is infinitely more sad, 
infinitely more tragical. It is a miserable lot, 
you think, that of the miner losing his eyesight 
down in the sunless mine, that of the cotton- 
spinner choking her lungs with the intolerable 
fluff, that of the needle-maker breathing the 
metallic dust that stops the motion of the heart. 
Yes, it is a miserable lot, but it is not so misera- 
ble, no worker's lot that you can imagine is so 
miserable, so pitiable, so contemptible, as that 
of the non-worker, the non-producer ; be he the 
foulest tramp or the most dainty fop — it makes 
no difference. For those who can complain with 
justice "No man has hired us," we have no 
word of blame. Tor one who has deliberately 
chosen idleness, what can we have but scorn and 
loathing ? There is not dirt enough in all 
trampdom to hide, there is not gold enough in 
Christendom to gild, the essential worthlessness 
of such a man — if man we are obliged to call 
him. 

Nevertheless the overwork of men and women 



66 



WORK AND REST. 



is sufficiently tragical. It is not the saddest 
tragedy of all, and still it is a dreadful tragedy. 
No talk about the dignity of labor can make it 
otherwise than so. The lyric raptures of Car- 
lyle, be they never so inspiring, will not allure 
us to forget the lot of those whose lives have 
no sunny exposure, no escape into the ideal, no 
beauty, no poetry, no society, no rest. Granted 
that the average workman does not know what 
to do with his leisure when he gets it. Granted 
that oftentimes he had better be still slaving at 
the plough or wheel than imbruting himself with 
such amusement as he seeks and finds. What 
then ? This only : that with increase of leisure 
there must be increase of education. Does it 
not make you groan to read the placards on the 
fences and see what dreary sport is offered to 
hard-working men and women for the shillings 
which they can so ill afford to spare ? Does it 
not sicken you to see upon the stands and in the 
windows the literature with which the multitude 
regales itself, literature compared with which the 
foulest sewerage is sweet and clean? Better 
work every moment, do you say, when not eating 
or sleeping, than have leisure for such amuse- 
ments and such literature as are at present fur- 



WORK AND REST. 



67 



nished and enjoyed ? Even so; but better still 
the education that will make such amusements 
and such literature disgusting and intolerable. 
To-day the supply of such foulness is not greater 
than the demand. Educate the people and the 
demand will cease, and with it the supply. The 
Police Gazette will be no longer published when 
it no longer pays. Certainly "the three B, ? s," 
reading, writing, and arithmetic, are not exhaust- 
ive of the education that will bring to pass so 
fine a consummation. The waters of a purer con- 
secration must baptize the teachers in our public 
schools before it is attained. It will take a great 
many teachers of the right sort and a great deal 
of time to do it. Teaching in America to-day is 
too often a makeshift, a stepping-stone to some- 
thing higher, or that is supposed to be so. There 
is nothing higher. The professions of law, of 
medicine, and of divinity, are all of less import- 
ance, of less dignity, of less grandeur, than the 
profession of the teacher rightly understood. 
"Paradise is at the feet of mothers," said the 
Eabbis. The future of America — better than 
any dream of Paradise that has yet been enter- 
tained — is at the feet of the school-teachers. 
Let no man or woman enlisted in this army, for 



68 



WORK AND REST. 



this holy war, dare to look down upon the work 
in hand. Look up to it, and let it lift you to the 
height of its stupendous possibility. 

Sadder than overwork is voluntary idleness ; 
but there is still another sadness that we have 
not named, another tragedy. Sweet and beautiful 
it is to see hard-working men and women resting 
from their toil, whether it be the farmer stretched 
in some shady nook at noon, or the much bur- 
dened " captain of labor " off for a few days " in 
the free," or the neat housewife pausing a little 
while between the plain things and the starched 
to have a frolic with the baby, who for some time 
past has been sputtering his sense of her neglect 
of his imperious claims. Yea, sweet is all rest 
from labor that is well and bravely done. But 
sweeter far and far more beautiful than any rest 
from work is rest in work. And by so much as 
such rest is sweet and beautiful, by so much is it 
sad and miserable for men and women not to rest 
in such labor as they have to do under the sun. 
No rest from toil, be it ever so generous, can 
atone for lack of rest and pleasure in the habitual 
task. Such lack of rest and pleasure is the 
tragedy which till now I have not named. It 
is a sadder tragedy than any overwork, for it 



WORK AND REST. 



69 



includes this tragedy and much beside. It is 
only not so sad as voluntary idleness. Nothing is 
so sad, so terrible, as this. But while voluntary 
idleness is rare, work in which there is no rest, 
no satisfaction, no delight, is omnipresent; so 
that, while in quality the tragedy of this is less 
acute than the tragedy of voluntary idleness, its 
quantity in the aggregate is much more consid- 
erable. How to lessen the amount of voluntary 
idleness in the community, be it the idleness of 
tramps or fops, is a great problem. How to 
lessen the amount of overwork in the community 
and, while increasing the amount of leisure, make 
it more sweet and sane, is another great problem. 
But the greatest problem of all is how to enable 
the thousands and millions to rest in their labor 
who now do not rest in it. No one man can solve 
this problem, now or at any future time. It is 
not a problem to be solved at any time from the 
outside, and, so to speak, up in the air. But 
almost every man can do something towards the 
solution of it in his own case or in behalf of some 
friend or neighbor, or some one who is working 
for him or with him. 

In the first place there are hundreds and 
thousands of men and women who could and 



70 



WORK 1XD REST. 



would rest in the work they have to do; ay, 
more than this, rejoice in it, revel in it. if it 
were not so unremitting. Tlesx f rom work, how- 
ever congenial the work may be, is essential to 
rest in it ; not for all. perhaps, but for the great 
majority. But while there are many who are in 
no danger of overworking themselves or those 
whom they employ, there are more who have 
no mercy on themselves and as little for other 
people. There are also those who. always hard 
upon themselves, are always easy with others, 
and some who cannot be too tender with them- 
selves, but never spare the muscles or the nerves 
of those whom they employ. This is the most 
deplorable variety of all. To it belong the thrifty 
housekeepers who assure you that the more you 
do for your servants the less they will do for 
you, and the more freedom you give them the 
less they will be satisfied. Nothing is too good 
for themselves ; anything is good enough for the 
housemaid or the cook. I doubt not there are 
hundreds of women at the present time whose 
sentiments for their domestics are less humane 
than the sentiments of the majority of slave- 
owners for their slaves before the war broke up 
that terrible relation. And as with women in 



WORK AND REST. 



71 



the home, so with, men in the warehouse or the 
manufactory. They make hardness a principle. 
The health or comfort of the workman does not 
enter into their calculations. How to make life 
as easy as possible for him consistently with their 
own advantage, or even at some sacrifice thereof, 
is a proposition which they never entertain. So 
wonder then that thousands of working men and 
women cannot rest in their work. They might, 
if they could rest from it a little oftener. They 
might, if they could only have occasionally some 
little sign of personal interest and sympathy; 
something to assure them that the man for whom 
they work distinguishes between them and his 
machines, and would be almost as sorry to have 
them break down as to have his engine slip an 
eccentric, or some accident happen to a press or 
loom. 

In much more intimate relationships than 
those of the employer and employed, sympathy 
is a charmed word. Many a wife and mother 
does not rest in her work, be her opportunities 
for resting from it ever so abundant, but frets 
and chafes in it continually for no other reason 
in the world than because she does not get that 
sympathy which she has a right to expect from 



72 



WORK AND REST. 



her husband. She economizes and contrives, she 
tries to make the home more beautiful, to make 
her garments and the children's pleasant for his 
eye, and he is as unconscious of it all as if he 
were an inhabitant of the planet Mercury. And 
many a husband goes to his work day after day 
with a heavy, restless heart, because the wife 
is so indifferent to his daily occupation. So 
that her allowance is not shortened she asks no 
questions, and the rise or fall of markets is to 
her of less importance than a dream within a 
dream. This lack of sympathy is hardly to be 
wondered at upon the woman's side, so long has 
she been systematically excluded from all active 
participation in her husband's business affairs. 
And doubtless there are still husbands who would 
resent the expression of any wifely interest or 
sympathy in their business life. " Let the cobbler 
stick to his last." But let us hope and trust 
that this variety of the genus husband is rapidly 
dying out. Without sympathy and interest there 
can be no confidence, and without confidence 
there will be many a wreck of fame and fortune 
that might easily have been averted. 

In the meantime there is a kind of sympathy 
in vogue among those less intimately related than 



WORK AND BEST. 



73 



husband and wife which, is worse than absolute 
indifference. There are " miserable comforters" 
who under the guise of consolation minister to our 
discontent and peevishness. Of all the varieties 
of flattery none is more harmful than that which 
addresses itself to making each new comer feel 
that he or she is the most overworked or ill-used 
person in the world. 

We are enjoined in the New Testament to 
make our calling and election sure, and if we 
could all do this, and would, the amount of rest in 
work in the community would be much increased. 
As it is, the round pegs in the square holes and 
the square pegs in the round holes are so innum- 
erable that we stumble over them a dozen times 
a day. A man cannot always make his calling 
sure. I mean that he cannot always determine 
for what sort of work he is best fitted. And if he 
could, as his "election" does not depend entirely 
on his own vote, as others very largely have the 
power of putting him in the place he is fitted 
for or keeping him out of it, we must be very 
careful how we blame a man for being out of 
place. At the same time it must be confessed 
that many more might make their calling sure, 
might determine what they are best fitted for, 



74 



WORK AND REST. 



than do. A great many men and women very 
persistently deceive themselves as to their capa- 
bilities. They know what they are fitted for, 
but they prefer some daintier work. Parental 
tenderness is oftentimes responsible for children 
hopelessly misplaced. A first-rate possible farmer 
or mechanic is spoiled to make a tenth-rate min- 
ister or a city clerk whose wages starve alike his 
body and his soul. We believe in the dignity of 
labor. But then the labor must be dignified. 
It must not soil the hands. It must permit one 
to be always well-dressed. And what comes of 
it is loss of self-respect; the hang-dog look of 
men who know that they are blundering at their 
work and standing in the way of others who 
might do it well. 

But we must not be sentimental in our talk of 
fitness and unfitness. It is not as if each man 
had his special aptitude for this or that employ- 
ment. The most of us with proper training could 
do some dozen or twenty things about equally 
well. We say we are unfit for this or that 
when we mean that we are lazy. We try to save 
our self-respect by imagining that we should 
do much better at some other work. That is 
as wise a couplet of John S. Dwight's as if 



WORK AND REST. 



75 



Goethe, to whom it is frequently attributed, had 
written it: 

" Best is not quitting the busy career: 
Rest is the fitting of self to one 1 8 sphere. 11 

Such fitting may be hard, but it is often possible 
where the attempt at first is most discouraging. 
The consciousness of personal independence can 
frequently be had upon no other terms. And it 
is never dear at any cost. It is good to follow 
one's bent, to obey the law of one's genius or 
aptitude where these exist, but it is better to pay 
one's way, to earn one's living. If the painter 
or poet cannot earn his bread and clothes with 
his painting or poetry; if, as Mrs. Browning 
says, "In England no one lives by verse that 
lives" — then let the painter or poet seek out 
some self-supporting work ; and, however uncon- 
genial it may be, they will rest in it as they never 
could in their painting or poetry. The chances 
are, the best of these will remain to cheer the 
pauses of bread-winning toil. Do you not remem- 
ber how Charles Lamb, hating the drudgery of 
the India House, yet found the pauses in that 
drudgery more fruitful for his wit and fancy than 
the long days of uninterrupted leisure to which 



76 



WORK AND REST. 



he at length attained? The painter Haydon, 
leading a life of insolvency and beggary ending 
in suicide, may arouse our pity, but he should 
arouse still more our condemnation. What if 
he was, as he believed, too great to be appreci- 
ated ? A man must take the world as he finds 
it, not as he thinks it ought to be or as he would 
like to have it. And if a man chooses to paint 
pictures thirty feet square, resolving that high 
art is impossible without big canvases, then in 
all decency let him suffer and starve in silence 
instead of berating society for not keeping an 
agreement with him that it has never made. Let 
us earn our bread and salt, whatever pictures go 
unpainted, whatever poems go unsung. So doing, 
we may be "mute" but we shall not be "inglori- 
ous " Miltons. 

To rest in one's work it is necessary that the 
worker should take home to heart and life that 
proverb, commonplace enough, but very fine and 
practical, " Whatever is worth doing at all is 
worth doing well." There are reaches to this 
proverb which we do not always think of when 
it falls so glibly from our tongues. There is a 
touchstone here of the lawfulness of our employ- 
ments. We must set our hand to nothing that 



WORK AND REST. 



77 



is not worth doing well. Not that whatever we 
do we must be able to do with our whole hearts. 
As things go this cannot be expected. Our hearts 
may be very largely with that ideal task which 
must for the present go unrealized, remaining 
purely an ideal or only worked after in the pauses 
of that toil which wins our daily bread. But 
that task which has not an ideal of its own is 
not for any true man to accept ; and when a man, 
not being able to achieve his absolutely necessary 
independence by the pursuit of his own personal 
ideal, chooses some other task, he is in duty bound 
to make that task as fine and good as he can make 
it ; if he is a shoemaker, for example, to put three 
stitches to the inch all round, though he should 
feel the splendors of a new Iliad or Odyssey 
throbbing in his brain. I believe in constancy 
to an ideal, but not merely in constancy to one's 
own personal ideal. This is excellent. Better 
that the statue should be a fragment than that 
the sculptor should mutilate his thought to suit 
his marble. But when we say "Whatever is 
worth doing at all is worth doing well," we say 
that all work that is worth doing has an ideal of 
its own, a standard of perfection, a Best, to which 
every worker is bound to aspire. I see not why 



78 



WORK AND REST. 



a man may not earn his living by painting or 
writing or preaching which is consciously poor 
and false just as honorably as by making tin-ware 
or shoes or cart-wheels that are not all that he 
can make them. This is bnt a tinsel nobleness 
that keeps one's own ideal under a glass-case 
or curtained religiously away from the stare of 
the ungodly and then consents to other work, 
resolving inwardly to do it ill and thereby 
show his contempt for it. " Gurowski cannot be 
degraded/' said the Count digging upon the rail- 
road, and asked how he could so degrade himself. 
" Gurowski cannot be degraded." No man can be 
degraded by doing the humblest task as best he 
can. The humblest task towers high above that 
man and dwarfs him into utter insignificance 
who thinks to cast contempt upon his work 
by doing it unworthily. Haydon shall furnish 
me with another illustration. Obliged to paint 
portraits for a living, he wreaked his contempt for 
portrait-painting on his subjects by making them 
more plain and ugly than they actually were. 
Little he thought that, so doing, he painted no 
enviable picture of himself ; that by the canons of 
character, which take precedence of all others, he 
had no more right to satirize the Lady Adelaide 



WORK AND REST. 



79 



Lindsay, who thought the bloom of her ugliness 
was wearing off a little, than to satirize his ideal 
Lazarus or Solomon. The necessary task no less 
than the voluntary one must be done as well as 
it deserves. This, or no self-respect. This, or 
no rest in labor. 

"Whatever is worth doing is worth doing 
well"; but some things are better worth doing 
than others, because they represent a higher or 
a sharper need of the community. The more a 
task is needed the more perfectly ought a man 
to rest in his work, no matter how wearisome it 
may be or how unpleasant. Our custom is to pay 
the workman less for the most repellent labor 
than for the most delicate. It was Fourier's 
idea that the more repellent labor should be 
better paid than the more pleasant. And, it 
seems to me, we ought to come to this. But no 
man ought to rest in useless work. A man brings 
me a lecture of my own, or rather a fragmentary 
report of one, which he has written with micro- 
scopic skill into a wonderfully contracted space. 
If he were paid for his time he tells me it would 
be worth a thousand dollars. But why should a 
man be paid for wasted time ? Should he not 
rather be fined for it or whipped for it ? His 



80 



WORK AND REST. 



work was absolutely worthless. My name and 
number on my ash-barrel would have been of 
greater service. 

But use a,nd need are words that must not be 
interpreted too narrowly. Man shall not live by 
bread alone. We need amusement, relaxation, 
beauty, as well as flour and coal. Whatever 
tends to make life healthier, happier, better, is 
of use. Does the work in which you are engaged 
so tend ? Yes ? Then you shall rest in it, be it 
dainty or be it hard. But if you are engaged in 
anything which tends to the decrease of health 
or happiness or virtue, rest in such labor if you 
dare. You cannot rest in it. In such a sleep as 
that, what dreams would come ! 

Such are a few of the more obvious conditions 
which must be observed if a man is to rest in his 
employment. Doubtless they go only a little way 
towards the solution of that " labor problem " of 
which we hear so much. But even to go a little 
way is better than to stagnate in dull sloth or 
in unsympathetic isolation. Observing these 
conditions, the individual can do something to 
redeem himself from self-contempt. He can 
compel the homage of all honest men. How- 
ever hard his lot, it shall not be devoid of a 



WORK AISTD REST. 



81 



deep inward peace, in comparison with which, 
no material advantage, however great, so that 
this inward peace be wanting, is deserving of a 
moment's thought or care. 

And now I may be told that the unrest of 
the time is deeper than any lack of harmony 
between the workman and his work ; that what 
inheres in this is but the smallest part of all 
that troubles the sad hearts of men and women. 
For the fountains of the great deep of thought 
are broken up. Men cannot rest in the old 
creeds and formulas, in the old doctrines and 
ideas. All things are being questioned, even the 
deep things of God. But lo ! above the roar and 
din, above the shouts of jubilant iconoclasts and 
the cries of timid souls, sounds the clear voice of 
the modern sage out of the deeps of spiritual 
calm in which he evermore abides. He speaks 
and says, " God offers to every mind its choice 
between truth and repose. Take which you 
please ; you can never have both. Between these 
as a pendulum man oscillates. He in whom the 
love of repose predominates will accept the first 
creed, the first philosophy, the first political 
party he meets. He gets rest, commodity, and 
reputation ; but he shuts the door of truth. He 



82 



WORK AND REST. 



in whom the love of truth predominates will 
keep himself aloof from all moorings, afloat. 
He will abstain from all dogmatism and recog- 
nize all the opposite negations between which 
as walls his being is swung. He submits to 
the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect 
opinion ; but he is a candidate for truth as the 
other is not, and respects the highest law of 
his being." 

It is bravely and sweetly said ; but, alas ! the 
actual case is harder in one respect than Emerson 
has represented it. Truth or repose, he says, 
you can never have both. We can have truth, 
he thinks, if we will give up all expectation of 
repose. But truth is just exactly what we can- 
not have ; only, in his own phrase, " suspense and 
imperfect opinion." Are we then even worse 
off than Emerson has represented ? Xay, better 
off — a hundred times better off. "We can have, 
not truth, but the desire for it, the passion for it, 
and an ever closer approximation to it, and with 
this we can have repose; not such repose as 
Emerson so nobly scorns, but rest in motion; 
not the rest of the good vessel as she lies with 
her great anchors burrowing down into the 
harbor's slimy ooze, but that rest more perfect 



WORK AND REST. 



83 



when she abandons herself upon the open sea to 
the propitious gale, and every inch of canvas is 
taut with the afflatus that keeps her as steady on 
her course as the white-breasted gulls that swoop 
above her in the great expanse of heaven. Who 
that has ever tasted of the sweetness of this 
rest in motion would be willing to exchange it 
for the dull monotony of the most peaceful 
anchorage ? And who that has ever tasted of 
the sweetness of that rest in motion which the 
spirit knows when it has abandoned itself with- 
out reserve to the pursuit of truth would ever 
willingly exchange the joy of that experience 
for any anchorage in the most peaceful haven 
of which the dogmatists can boast along their 
pleasant shores ? Only be well assured that you 
have no finality to defend, no essentials that are 
superior to all revision ; that your only interest 
is to approximate more and more nearly to that 
Truth which you can never hope to see full- 
orbed, — and that peace of God which passeth 
understanding shall be yours, an indefeasible 
possession. 

" The winds that o'er my ocean run 
Keach through all heavens beyond the sun; 



WORK AND REST. 



Through life, through death, through fate, 

through time, 
Grand breaths of God, they sweep sublime. 

' Eternal trades, they cannot veer, 
And, blowing, teach us how to steer; 
And well for him whose joy, whose care, 
Is but to keep before them fair. 

' And so, 'mid storm or calm, my barque 
With snowy wake still nears her mark : 
Cheerly the trades of being blow, 
And, sweeping down the wind, I go." 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



Daily the bending skies solicit man, 
The seasons chariot him from this exile, 
The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair, 
The storm- winds urge the heavy weeks along, 
Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights 
Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home. 

— Emerson. 

(86) 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



However it may be about our prayers to God, 
how is it, do you think, about God's prayers 
to us? You have not thought, perhaps, that 
there are any such prayers. But there is cer- 
tainly a beautiful suggestion of them in the New 
Testament phrase of the apostle, " as if God did 
beseech you." This, also, is one of the phrases 
that the revisers have despoiled, so that now it 
reads, " as though God were entreating by us." 
But the old meaning is not gone ; and, if it were, 
it would not make a particle of difference. Every 
good thought of the old mistranslation is just as 
good to-day as ever and just as much a divine 
revelation and a word of God, for what makes 
any saying or writing a divine revelation and a 
word of God is the beauty and the truth and the 
help that there is in it. That is the most inspired 



88 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



which is the most inspiring. This cannot be 
insisted on too often or too earnestly, so long as 
the majority persist in seeking for the signs and 
proofs of inspiration and revelation in some par- 
ticular place or time or personality. 

As if God did beseech you ! The phrase as it 
occurs in the New Testament is but a figure of 
speech. It says " as if." It does not say that 
God does pray to us, that he does beseech us. And 
yet that he does actually do so is one of the most 
obvious things in the whole range of our experi- 
ence. And while to many excellent people the 
wonder of the centuries has been that God has 
not answered their prayers, or the prayers of 
other people better or more religious than them- 
selves, the real wonder all along has been that 
God's prayers to men have so often met with 
no response or with only the faintest and most 
superficial. Is it not so ? Consider just a few 
of these innumerable prayers that like a fountain 
rise continually from out the world's great heart, 
and then find me mistaken in this strong assur- 
ance, if you can. 

One of them is the habitual order of the world. 
Of course, this is a circumstance which makes a 
different impression now from what it did in 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



89 



the faint red and greyish morning of the times. 
Who does not know Bichard Hooker's large and 
sumptuous affirmation of the significance of order 
in the world, or, as he called it, law ? "Of law," 
he said, "there can be no less acknowledged than 
that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the 
harmony of the world. All things in heaven and 
earth do her homage, — the very least as feeling 
her care, and the greatest as not exempted from 
her power." But there was a time when many 
people were extremely disinclined to this way of 
thinking about law, a time when the difficulties 
of science were the consolations of faith, and the 
victories of science were its despair. Every field 
annexed to the demesne of order was supposed 
to make so much narrower the range of God's 
complicity in the world of matter and of man. 
It must be confessed that the scientific people 
were often quite as foolish as the religious in 
this matter 5 for they imagined the same foolish 
thing 5 only, where the religious were anxious and 
frightened, the scientific, especially the smaller 
kind, were arrogant and hilarious, and did their 
best to aggravate the anxieties and fears of the 
religious with the assurance that in a little time 
they would have a world without God. But there 



90 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



could hardly be a grosser misconception than that 
the order of the world, or rather the sense of this 
order, had always been opposed to the feeling of 
God's presence in it until very recently, when a 
few philosophers and poets came to the help of 
an atheistical science and a trembling faith with 
the assurance that more law meant more God, 
and that the mysteries of law were more religious 
and inspiring than the mysteries of ignorance and 
blind credulity had ever been. The Old Testa- 
ment abounds in praises of the orderly arrange- 
ment of the world, — " The sun knoweth his going 
down," "Seed-time and harvest shall not fail," 
and so on. And these orderly arrangements are 
cited as the proofs of God's protecting care. New 
every morning and fresh every evening are the 
pledges of his constant love. 

But what did I mean by saying that law, or 
order, is one of the prayers of the beseeching 
God ? I meant that the order of the world has 
always been an invitation and an exhortation to 
mankind to make its life an orderly and law- 
abiding thing. The ordered circumstance of life 
has in all ages been an answer to this glorious 
prayer, whose words are constellations, galaxies, 
sun, moon and stars, the faithful seasons, grav- 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



91 



itation, weight and measure, heat and cold. It is 
the order of the material world that has initiated 
and enforced the order of the human world. This 
has ticked into time with that, as one clock, in 
the fable, ticks into time with another clock. 
Man in his orderly arrangements does but " fetch 
his eyes up to God's style and manners of the 
sky." The very secret and the end of life is the 
harmony of organization and environment. The 
unhappy man, the unsuccessful man, the wicked 
man, is simply a misfit, a round peg in the square 
hole. 

Now, when I said that the wonderful thing is 
not that God does not answer our prayers, but 
that we do not answer his, I did not mean that 
we do not answer his at all. To say that would 
be a foolish or a wicked misrepresentation ; for 
the answer to God's great prayer of law and order 
has been only less glorious than the prayer itself. 
It is as glorious as all the manifold arrangements 
of our human life that are conformed to the reg- 
ularities of natural law, to the seasonal changes, 
to the properties of matter, magnetism, elec- 
tricity, chemical affinity, and so on. By the 
known properties of steam God prays men to 
make their boilers thick and strong ; by the 



92 



THE BESEECHIXG- GOD. 



known properties of wood and iron he prays theni 
to lay this way and not that their beams and 
rafters and the fair courses of those gleaming 
stones with which they build the habitations of 
their peace, the monuments and temples of their 
pride. 

Man, then, is not inexorable to God. He listens 
to that great heart-moving prayer which is sylla- 
bled in the majestic order of the world. Behold- 
ing as in a glass this order, he is changed into 
the same image from glory to glory, even as by 
the Lord, the spirit. He has his choice to do this 
or suffer and be broken on the wheel he will not 
use to turn his mill and grind his wheat and corn. 
The burnt child dreads the fire. Men are but 
children of a larger growth. They dread the 
various things that hurt and hinder them. They 
cleave to those that give them help and speed. 
And thus they come to find an ordered beauty in 
their lives. And still the wonder is that, where 
the voice of the divine beseeching is so sweet and 
strong, men do not always listen to its prayer, 
that they so often disobey the laws which are 
already known, and are so indifferent to the dis- 
covery of those which, if discovered and obeyed, 
would bring them an assured felicity and an 
abiding peace. 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



93 



Another prayer of God to men is that whose 
words are, to a wide extent, the same words that 
resound in that great prayer of the divine order 
which is continually making its appeal to men. 
The words are the same ; but they are differently 
arranged, and so the meaning is different, — 
beauty, and not order. It is observation and 
analysis that attune the ear to the beseeching of 
the world as it is conceived by science in the 
harmony of its laws and adaptations; but the 
apprehension of beauty is synthetic. It is a 
flash, a revelation. Science has beauties of its 
own; but neither the telescope nor the micro- 
scope has anything in its field so beautiful as 
that which almost every night hangs over us, 
the beauty of the heavens as it strikes the naked 
eye; nothing so beautiful as the unanalyzed 
woods and waters, the grasses and the flowers, 
the clouds that make the morning and the even- 
ing fair, and sketch on the celestial blue a beauty 
rarer than its own. Is it not in all these things 
as if God did beseech us to co-operate with him, 
to resolve not to be satisfied with mere passive 
appropriation of the original beauty of the world, 
but go to work to make something beautiful with 
our own hands, with our own brains, with our 



94 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



own shaping spirit of imagination ? And to this 
prayer of the Eternal, as well as to the other, the 
answer has been often rich and full and grand. 
We call this answer art, and, like the divine 
commandment, it is exceedingly broad; for it 
includes painting, architecture, sculpture, poetry, 
and music. There are those who imagine that 
some of these are superfluous. What painting of 
the artist is as beautiful as the living, breathing 
beauty that we know in woods and fields, in skies 
and waters, in faces fair enough " to slay all a 
man's hoarded prudence at a blow 99 ? Ah ! but 
we want the beauty of the woods and fields to 
come and stay with us. We want to be reminded 
of these things when we are far away from them 
here in the city's loud and stunning tide of various 
care and crime, to know that they will wait for 
us until we come again. And, as for the beauty 
of fair faces, men are not privileged to look at 
more than one or two in any satisfying way. I 
know that there are portraits, too, so personal, so 
intimate, that, if we look at them too long, they 
seem to look at us with injured modesty and soft 
reproach. And, still, there is a difference between 
the painted and the real flame. Then, too, it 
should be said, the painter, the sculptor, never 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



95 



dreams that lie is making something better than 
the living form or face. Only he wants to be a 
fellow-workman with God, to renew the ancient 
rapture of the Almighty in the creative act ; and 
it must not be forgotten that there are forms of 
art wherein there is, as it were, some elongation 
of the Almighty's arm, something achieved which 
he cannot achieve without the human help. 

What is there in nature corresponding to the 
melodies and harmonies of Mozart and Men- 
delssohn and Beethoven and Wagner ? Those 
who are wise in such things tell us that not even 
Shelley's lark or Keats's nightingale could sing 
one single chord, but only a succession of notes,— 
these certainly of a most rare and penetrating 
sweetness. And this mention of Shelley and 
Keats reminds us that the poet's art, as well as 
the musician's, is a distinct addition to the range 
of natural beauty. Granted that not even Words- 
worth could report half the beauty of the natural 
world ; that no dream of fair women Tennyson 
might dream could equal the reality which daily 
walks abroad ; that Shakspere's men and women 
have their match and shame in living Hamlets 
and Othellos, Portias and Cordelias. And, still, 
as all our sensuous perceptions of the outward 




96 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



universe are, as the psychologists assure us, 
non-resembling signs, — a truth which our own 
observation easily confirms, — so are the forms 
the poets use to express their fancy and imagina- 
tion so many non-resembling signs; and one, 
without irreverence or impiety, may conceive the 
conscious God as finding a new pleasure in the 
creations of his poets, as, in a less degree, in a 
fine show of rhododendrons or chrysanthemums, 
such as you and I have often seen. And once 
they stirred my heart in such a way that I broke 
out into a little sonnet-song about them after 
this fashion : — 

O you great beauties, who can never know 
How passing fair you are to look upon ! 
I, "mid your glories slowly wandering on, 
And almost faint with joy that you can glow 
With hues so rich and varied, row on row, 
A corner in my heart for him alone 
Must keep who hath in your fair petals shown 
Such things to us as never had been so 
But for his loving patience sweet and long; 
Ay, and no less to the clear eye of God, 
Who never yet in all his endless years, 
Till you outbloomed in colors pure as song, 
Had seen such fairness springing from the sod 
As this which fills our eyes with happy tears. 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



97 



Well, so it happens that God's prayer of 
beauty has not gone unheeded altogether, — nay, 
but has had a large and wide response ; and yet, 
when we remind ourselves what a prayer it is, 
full of what strong entreaty, pulsing through 
time and space for countless centuries, the 
answer to it has not been — I think you will 
agree with me — so very generous or remarkable. 
To go about our city streets, to look into our shop 
windows, is to wonder whether men do not prefer 
ugliness to beauty, after all. That is, the most 
of them. They go on making ugly things, — ugly 
houses, ugly furniture, ugly clothes, — when they 
might make things beautiful and lovely with 
less trouble and expense. 

But, you may say, all are not artists born, and 
very few are made. As with the poet of the 
proverb, so with all the rest. True, very true ; 
and what then ? Is there no answer that those 
who are neither born artists nor made artists 
can make to the beseeching beauty of the world ? 
Do not believe it. 

" I saw the beauty of the world 
Before me like a flag unfurled,—- 
The splendor of the morning sky 
And all the stars in company. 



98 



THE BESEECHIXG GOD. 



I thought, How wonderful it is ! 

My soul said, There is more than this." 

And there is more. — the beauty of the inner 
life. It is true, as Milton said, that that also 
ought to be a true poem. Yes, a true picture, 
and a statue white and pure ; a temple, too, broad- 
based upon the earth, but lifting up a spire like 
Salisbury's into the heavenly blue; a piece of 
music full of wandering melodies, with a great 
harmony pervading all. It is true that there are 
such lives, — that they outnumber far the pictures 
and the poems, the symphonies and sonatas, the 
statues and cathedrals. It would go hard with 
us if they did not. And they are everywhere. 
"Even in a palace life may be well led." Even 
in a palace ! It was an emperor who said it, and 
he said but what he knew. Even in a hovel, too. 
Even in the most ordinary slices of our city brick 
and stone, houses tipped up on end, like the 
micaceous slate and other strata of our New 
England hills. So, then, if we cannot make 
pictures and poems, why not do this better thing 
which is possible for you and me ? As if God 
did beseech you, shine the stars of heaven, and 
the earth puts on its beauty ever fresh and new. 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



99 



Why make our lives a blot, a stain, a smirch, on 
this beseeching loveliness ? Why not take up 
the song of Whittier, and sing, — 

" Parcel and part of all, 
I keep the festival." 

And why not do more, — not merely sing as 
Whittier sang, but do as Whittier did ? Why 
not? 

But time would fail me if I should endeavor to 
enumerate the hundredth part of all the prayers 
which the beseeching God sends up to us from out 
the glorious meaning and the splendid pageant 
of the world. In the fore part of this writing 
I spoke as if the new translation of the phrase, 
"as though God were entreating by us," were 
something less suggestive and impressive than 
the former rendering, "as if God did beseech 
you." But now it comes to me that the new 
rendering goes back into the old, and carries it 
a step beyond, or, rather, furnishes it with a new 
and striking illustration. "As though God were 
entreating by us." That is the significance of 
all the great and good who have made the course 
of history beautiful and noble with their high 
examples and their holy trust. 



100 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



"Ever their phantoms arise before us, 
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood ; 
At bed and table they lord it o'er us 
With looks of beauty and words of good." 

In the traditional theology it is said that we 
have a mediator, an intercessor, with God. That 
is a doctrine which need not be examined at this 
present time. Meanwhile, how many mediators, 
how many intercessors, God has with us! all 
heavenly and mundane things, and then — im- 
measurable addition! — all human things as well. 

" God's doors are men; the Pariah hind 
Admits thee to the perfect mind." 

Yes, and admits the perfect mind to us. And, if 
the lowest, how much more the higher and the 
highest in their various degrees ! This is the 
reason why it is so good for us to read of saintly 
and heroic lives, of golden deeds, of noble sacri- 
fices gladly made for truth and righteousness. 
Eor if these examples do not summon us to 
braver things, if the music there is in them does 
not lift at our feet so that they are weary with 
forbearing, and they cannot stay, but must take 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



101 



the forward path, however steep and hard, then 
are they verily our accusation and our shame. 
And here is the inestimable advantage of such a 
book as the New Testament, or rather three such 
early pamphlets as the first three Gospels, telling 
the story of the life of Jesus in such a way that 
not all the integuments of the mythologists can 
so disguise his actual proportions that we cannot 
see what a true life was here, what a true poet, 
what a great loving heart, what a passionate 
sympathy with all sorrowful and sinful folk, 
what an honest hatred of self-righteousness and 
hypocrisy ! It is true that the New Testament 
is like the sun and air. We are so habituated to 
it that we take it for granted, and we make good 
the v/isdom of Goethe : " Words often repeated 
ossify the organs of intelligence for with words 
often read it is the same. It was a devout Epis- 
copalian who told me that she had put her New 
Testament out of reach for a whole year, and 
then came back to it with a new sense of its 
importance. And I know another lady who 
went the round of nearly all the great religions, 
dabbled in Brahmanism and Buddhism, knew all 
about Atma and Karma and that sort of thing, 
or as much as anybody, and then woke up one 



102 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



morning and discovered — the New Testament, 
and found it wonderfully sweet and good. 

"She had wandered on the mountains, mist-bewild- 
ered ; 

And, lo ! a breeze came, and the veil was lifted, 
And priceless flowers, which she had trod unheed- 
ing, 

Were blowing at her feet." 

I have often thought how wonderful the New 
Testament and the life of Jesus would appear 
to us if we could come upon them in an entirely 
fresh and natural way. I never read my dear 
friend Samuel Johnson's sympathetic studies of 
Brahmanism and Buddhism and so on without 
wishing that he might have come to the study 
of Christianity just as he came to them, not tired 
of hearing Aristides called the Just, Jesus called 
perfect man and perfect God, but with unbiassed 
mind and heart. 

And it is not as if God's intercessors with us, 
by whose lips and lives he is forevermore beseech- 
ing us to make our lives some better, holier thing, 
were all dead and buried, all men and women 
of the past. They walk the earth to-day ; their 
tender shadows fall upon us as we, lame from 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



103 



our birth, lie at the gate of the temple which 
is called Beautiful ; their words encourage us ; 
their actions shame the dull inertia and the 
sordid selfishness of our habitual lives. 

" Whene'er a noble deed is wrought, 
Whene'er is spoken a noble thought, 
Our hearts in glad surprise 
To higher levels rise." 

And, if we do not content ourselves with "feel- 
ing good," as people say, or with feeling bad, — 
i.e., with the luxury of self -accusation and con- 
tempt, as many do, — but straightway go about to 
practise some obedience to the heavenly vision, 
then for that time, at least, God gets an answer 
to his prayer : his beseeching has not been in 
vain. 

Consider also how the happiness of a good 
conscience, the pains and penalties of an evil 
conscience, are, or should be, of such potency 
with us that here also it is as if God did beseech 
us to choose the straight and narrow and avoid 
the broad and crooked way. That wickedness is 
the pursuit of pleasure is a doctrine that from 
first to last gets much unfavorable comment from 
the course of things. The wicked people are 



104 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



often miserably unhappy. Perhaps the wicked- 
est are not. It may be with them as it was with 
those whom Swedenborg saw, or imagined that 
he saw, in hell, — as happy there as were the 
good in heaven. Not punished, therefore ? Nay, 
because "they that are in sin are also in the 
punishment of sin." But, however it may be 
with the wickedest, with those whose conscience 
is not dead the way of the transgressor is hard. 
Truly, they make their bed in hell ; and, if God 
is also there, it is to stir the fire. They cannot 
read of any fault akin to theirs, and not flush hot 
with burning shame or feel a sudden coldness 
at the heart. A nobility contrasting with their 
shame has much the same effect. Hardly can 
they take up a novel that it does not seem written 
about them, or go to see a play that does not 
seem as obviously prearranged to catch their 
conscience as Hamlet's was to catch the con- 
science of the king. Then all the powers of 
the imagination league and lend themselves to 
make the misery more keen. The most unsus- 
pecting visitor is awaited as a messenger of 
doom ; and they are as if they rode in spiritual 
nakedness, their every sin exposed, while every 
key-hole has its peeping Tom, a witness of their 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



105 



shame. And, then, upon the other hand there 
are the visions of a pure and honest life; and 
they stand abashed in their presence, and feel 
"how awful goodness is, and virtue in her shape 
how lovely, — see and feel their loss." To think 
of these things seriously — and how can we think 
of them at all, and not think of them seriously 
and solemnly ? — is to wonder that more people, 
if they are not enticed into the right way by the 
beauty of holiness, are not scared from every 
other by those shames, regrets, and agonies 
which are the portion of the man or woman 
who, knowing what is best, chooses the poorer 
and the worst. 

Once more, God makes the voice of others' 
pain and misery his voice, pleading with us to 
remember those whom he seems to have forgot- 
ten. Among all the golden deeds of history, what 
one do we remember with more admiration than 
that of Sir Philip Sidney dying on the disastrous 
field of Zutphen, and foregoing the cup of cold 
water because another's necessity was greater 
than his own ? There is a battle raging which 
has centuries for its hours, and races for its 
regiments and battalions, whose incidents are 
revolutions, reformations, here the initiation of 



106 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



a new religion, there the emancipation of a race. 
In this battle we are soldiers each and all ; and 
if, sore wounded now and then and craving a cup 
of water for our thirst, we behold some fellow- 
soldier hurt more cruelly, there is for us, if we 
have the knightly temper, no other thing to say 
but, "His necessity is greater than mine"; no 
other thing to do but to put the proffered cup 
aside. But this is not the most common situa- 
tion. The most common situation is that some 
have all they need of water, wine, and every 
sweet and precious thing, and some have none of 
all these things ; and the necessity of these is 
not to those as it should be, — as if God did 
beseech them out of their abundance and excess 
to give the fainting brother, be he friend or foe, 
that which shall stanch his wound, and, if it 
cannot save his life, so touch his death with 
human pity that he may say as one did say in a 
soldier's hospital at Washington, as he felt the 
strong embracing of the nurse's arms about him, 
" Underneath me are the everlasting arms." 

As if God did beseech you ! 0 friends, it is 
not as if his prayer to us were this or that. It 
is the boundless whole. It is all worlds and 
times, all men and things, all literature and 



THE BESEECHING GOD. 



10T 



history, all art and song, all exaltations of tri- 
umphant love, all agonies of shame and sin, all 
blessed memories of those who have expected us 
to be good and true, all tender hopes of some day 
meeting them again and being with them where 
they are. a As if God were entreating you by 
us." To-day, if you have heard his voice, harden 
not your hearts. 



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